Who is the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition?

Our mission is to reverse the trend of mass incarceration in Colorado. We are a coalition of nearly 7,000 individual members and over 100 faith and community organizations who have united to stop perpetual prison expansion in Colorado through policy and sentence reform.

Our chief areas of interest include drug policy reform, women in prison, racial injustice, the impact of incarceration on children and families, the problems associated with re-entry and stopping the practice of using private prisons in our state.

Wednesday, August 20, 2014

When Tom Clements accepted the job of executive director of the
Colorado Department of Corrections three years ago, he knew he was
taking on an enormous challenge. Two particularly alarming sets of
figures, trends that he believed to be more than casually related,
caught his eye immediately.
One had to do with the excessive use of solitary confinement in order
to isolate and punish the state's most troublesome prisoners. The other
was the staggeringly high failure rate of parole.
Clements was a numbers guy. A native of the Show Me State, he valued
empirical data more than gut instincts or sacred cows. A former parole
officer who'd worked his way up to the top ranks of the Missouri state
prison system, he was part of a growing reform movement in corrections:
the promulgation of "evidence-based practices" by administrators whose
idea of managing offenders is turning them into productive citizens
again rather than simply moving them around. What mattered were hard
numbers and programs with a track record of successful outcomes, and the
data on the Colorado DOC wasn't good.

Tom Clements.

New DOC head Rick Raemisch was told to honor the legacy of Tom Clements.

At the time that Clements arrived, Colorado had close to 1,500
inmates in solitary, or administrative segregation — which worked out to
be about seven times the national average. Only a quarter of those in
lockdown were there because of assaults on staff or other inmates;
ad-seg had become the one-size-fits-all method of dealing with the
mentally ill, suspected gang members, chronic screwups, or anyone else
who appeared to be at risk of harm or of harming others. The average
stay in isolation was nearly two years. Worse, 47 percent of the ad-seg
prisoners completed their sentences in lockdown and were paroled
directly to the street, with little or no preparation for the move from
an eight-by-ten-foot cell to city life.
Forty-seven percent. As Clements saw it, that figure had a lot to do
with some other dismal figures: the state's stubbornly high recidivism
rate, hovering around 50 percent, and the steady return of thousands of
parole violators to prison within months of their release.
The subject of Colorado's ad-seg problem figured prominently in the
discussions of the executive-director job that Clements had with
Governor John Hickenlooper. Without mentioning any names, Hickenlooper
made passing reference to one prisoner, the son of a friend, who'd spent
the bulk of his sentence in lockdown because of disciplinary problems.
Clements took the position that the routine release of damaged, violent
felons directly from isolation wasn't simply a parole problem, but a
threat to public safety.
Reducing the use of solitary confinement became one of the new
chief's top priorities. He pushed for more frequent and thorough reviews
of who was in ad-seg and why, as well as initiatives to get prisoners
out of isolation and into classes, drug treatment and mental-health
programs before release. During his first two years on the job, the
state's ad-seg population dropped by nearly 50 percent. Clements was
encouraged by the progress, but hardly satisfied.
"It's only a matter of time," he told one top deputy, "until something goes bad."
His prediction proved to be all too accurate. But not even the new
chief expected it to go quite as bad as it did, literally on his own
doorstep. On the evening of March 19, 2013, Clements answered the
doorbell at his Monument home and was confronted by a parole absconder
named Evan Ebel — the same "son of a friend" Hickenlooper had mentioned
during Clements's 2011 job interview. Released from ad-seg just seven
weeks earlier, Ebel had already killed Nathan Leon, a pizza delivery
driver, just to get his uniform. Ebel fatally shot Clements with a
nine-millimeter handgun and fled, only to be killed himself two days
later in a shootout with Texas authorities.
Almost eighteen months later, many questions about the death of Tom
Clements remain unanswered. Authorities have described it as a
gang-ordered assassination. Citing unnamed sources, the Denver Post
has even suggested that it was a murder for hire, commissioned by a
Saudi national who'd been denied a transfer out of a Colorado prison
just days earlier. But aside from Stevie Vigil, the young woman who
supplied Ebel with his gun, no charges have been filed against anyone in
the case — and longtime friends of Ebel, citing letters and a recorded
message he left behind, have insisted that the murder was an act of
personal vengeance against a system that he despised.
Trying to make sense of a senseless killing has put considerable
strain not only on investigators, but on DOC officials, as well, who
have struggled to define what sort of "lesson," if any, can be gleaned
from the tragedy. On one hand, Rick Raemisch, the current director, has
expressed his determination to honor Clements's legacy, leading to a
dramatic reduction in the number of mentally ill prisoners in ad-seg.
But the shock and outrage of the slaying has also led to a major shakeup
in the department's leadership team and retrenchment in many critical
areas, including parole. Clements had set out to change not only the
direction of DOC policy, but also the agency's internal culture, and
many of his initiatives are now on hold or have been quietly scrapped.
While the system failures exposed by Ebel's rampage have generated a
flurry of new legislation and heightened security measures, some
observers wonder if Clements's death has also jeopardized reforms that
he regarded as long overdue.